


You Cannot Be His

by Emono



Series: Safe and Sound [5]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Hugs, M/M, Spoilers, between Cecil and Station Management, father/son relationship, sort of, worried!Carlos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 12:40:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emono/pseuds/Emono
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil and Station Management have a talk about a certain lovely scientist. They are not pleased. </p><p>Carlos tunes into Cecil's radio show only to be horrified by what he hears. </p><p>Despite a hair change on both sides, they come to realize that they may just be friends at last.</p><p>Spoilers for Episode 3, "Station Management".</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Cannot Be His

**Really horrible terrible photoset[here](http://emono-omae.tumblr.com/post/60182166853/there-was-a-twinkle-in-those-bright-eyes-darling). Thanks for reading!**

* * *

 

Cecil walked up to Station Management's door, his stride much more relaxed than those who had dared the same path. It was contract negotiation day and the interns were passing out left and right. He had nerves but they weren't nearly as awful as Dana and the others. It was the same every time. He'd greet them, they'd slide out a letter that said he was renewed for another year, and that would be it.

 

Instead of worrying, Cecil's mind was on the morning he'd had. It had started off with an angry phone call from Carlos screaming about how his books had transformed over night.

 

“ _They're just not working, Cecil! Either I can't pry them open or the ink's bled off. What the hell did your town do to my books?!_ ”

 

Cecil had countered that maybe the world was just angry at him for cutting his hair short. The scientist was far from pleased when they'd hung up.

 

The creeping fear had seized him just a few steps into the radio station. He'd been struck motionless with terror at the base of the stairs, he hadn't been able to move for almost fifteen minutes. It happened a few times a year but he hadn't' expected it so early in the day, and certainly not during summer. Paralyzing fears were more of a spring-time thing.

 

He came up to the door but didn't knock. The frame rattled faintly and he knew his presence was felt, there was no need to irritate them with sharp noise. An envelope slid out from beneath the wood, a simple goldenrod color and quite unassuming. He picked it up with a small smile, nails plucking at the edges to open it up properly. He wouldn't say he looked forward to these meetings but they weren't always bad. Depending on the mood of the building, the messages could be almost affectionate. Like a drunk father on a good, sober day.

 

The message within this particular envelope only held one word.

 

**Carlos.**

 

“Carlos?” Cecil parroted the name, getting a good sense of what he was supposed to explain. He decided very quickly to be honest. What else could he be with his protectors and providers? The entity that took him in, gave him a purpose when he was just a freak, gave him drive and ambition. They'd given him his reason to live and something different was in their exchange. That one word conveyed something new – uncertainty.

 

“He's a friend of mine and a good, brilliant man. I find him quite...beautiful,” Cecil confessed, teeth grazing over his inner lip, “I like him.”

 

Another card came out.

 

**Too much.**

 

Cecil read it with a new furrow in his brows, “I've never liked anything or anyone this much. I thought you'd be pleased that I'd met someone.”

 

He stayed down on one knee to keep picking up the letters.

 

**The radio is your everything.**

 

“Of course it is, it's more than I could ever want,” Cecil assured the door, “To help and report and inform – I couldn't ask for anything else. Carlos is important but he's not like the show. They are two completely different things.”

 

 **There's no difference** , he read with widening eyes, **Carlos cannot mean so much. This is your life. We are your life.**

 

Cecil's hands started to shake so badly he dropped the note, another coming out to replace it.

 

**We own you. You are ours. You cannot be his.**

 

“No, no! We're not like that! I adore him but he's not – he doesn't feel – ” Cecil flushed so darkly even his ears heated up, stammering uncharacteristically as he thought of the scientist caring about him like that, “He's married to his work! He probably wants a woman to give him children and a house somewhere far away from here.”

 

There was a beat or two before another came.

 

**You would leave your home?**

 

“Never,” Cecil stated firmly with disbelief all over his face, “I could never leave Night Vale.”

 

The paper smacked him in the leg.

 

**Not even for Carlos?**

 

Cecil couldn't give a real answer and the door started rattling, more violent than before. He got to his feet and began to back off as a harsh hissing came from behind it.

 

“Please-”

 

A dark mist started to leak out of the cracks, heavy like liquid and creeping along the wall akin to a living thing. Cecil did the only thing he could think of, he took off at a run in the general direction of his radio office. There was safety among his soundboards and microphones, his headphones the shield he so desperately needed.

 

The door was already open and he rushed inside, tears searing paths down his cheeks.

 

It was not his hands that slammed the door, nor was it he who locked it.

 

*******

 

Carlos shouldn't have tuned in to the station but he'd been having trouble resisting lately. It had started off light-heartedly enough with the jabs at him for cutting his hair (which Cecil still refused to let go) but there had been a growing tension all throughout Cecil's show, something to do with Station Management. He'd almost turned it off three times but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He prayed it was a joke or a story, that they were doing a line to break up the seriousness of the rest of the reports.

 

The weather cut out. There was a muffled sound, like something swooping through the air. Carlos looked around, afraid one of his personal test animals had gotten loose. It took a moment for him to realize it was coming from his radio, the speaker carrying the sound throughout the room.

 

“ _Hello, radio audience..._ ” Cecil's voice was a whisper through the device, “ _I come to you live from under my desk, where I have dragged my microphone, and am currently hiding in the fetal position. Did you write letters? Then you should not do this anymore. Station management has opened its door for the first time in my memory, and is now roaming the building. I don’t know exactly what management looks like, as that is when I took cover under my desk, and I can only hope that they are not listening to what’s going out right now or else I may have sealed my fate._ ”

 

Carlos was horrified by what he heard, he almost couldn't believe it. Cecil, who had proven himself somewhere between painfully shy and completely collected, was scared and alone. Maybe hurt, maybe dying. He had no idea what Station Management was capable of or what they looked like but the host's voice painted enough of a picture for him to worry.

 

“ _I can hear only a kind of clicking footstep, and a faint hissing sound like releasing steam. An intern went to see what management wanted and has not returned. If you are related to Jerry Hartman, afternoon board operator at Night Vale Community Radio, I am sorry to inform you that he is probably dead or at least corporally absorbed into management permanently. Jerry and Chad the interns will both be missed, but we will surely see them in the Thanksgiving Day Dead Citizens Impersonation Contest, which this year will be in the employee lounge under the Night Vale Mall from eleven AM to nine forty-five PM._ ”

 

Carlos blanched at the notification. Two interns, dead? Absorbed? What kind of creature was Station Management that they could do this so easily?

 

Cecil's voice broke into a light sob, a chink in his armor, “ _There will be a cash bar and two twister boards._ ”

 

There was a roar over the speaker, ghastly and not too far away. Cecil inhaled sharply, a sound like a mouth scratching the surface of a microphone coming through. Carlos's hands shook as he tried to feed his samples by dropper into the mass spectrometer.

 

“ _I am going to see if I can make a break for the door. If you don’t hear from me again, it has truly been a pleasure. Good night, Night Vale. And goodbye!_ ”

 

Carlos fumbled hard, his hand slipping and spilling a whole set of test tubes. The chemicals crawled across the table and dripped off the side, staining and clinging everything they came across. The ravenette managed to sit down on the nearest stool, wet soil streaked across his lab coat. He didn't know what was going on, he didn't know how to act. Cecil could've been seriously injured at the moment and there was nothing he could do.

 

Or was there?

 

Carlos got to his feet so fast that the stool rattled. He shed his coat as his feet took him up the stairs to the actual _house_ pat of his apartment, the half left untouched by his scientific need. He needed a fresh pair of clothes and to wash his face, ignoring the disarray of his new hair for the moment.

 

*******

 

He found Cecil's apartment just as easily as before, remembering it from the address he'd stolen out of the host's file in their lab. All the prominent members of the Night Vale community had one, mostly composed by his own interns. He knocked on the door a bit too hard to be polite but, like last time, he was overcome with hot adrenaline. It came open and he expected to find his friend a bloody mess, missing an arm, maybe even his face.

 

The Cecil who appeared from behind the door was whole, vest shed and shirt half unbuttoned to expose a sliver of chest. Whatever he'd thought of the man being slim, he was wrong. Though his hips were trim he was tight with muscle beneath all those layers. There was one thing different about him.

 

“Your hair,” Carlos gaped in what he hoped wasn't an unbecoming way, “It's, uh...redder.”

 

Cecil reached up and touched his hair, a self-conscious smile creeping over his lips. It seemed that every time he shifted into his natural form he'd come back with something different or changed or missing. The time before he'd shifted back three shades lighter, this time he'd glanced in the mirror to see that gold had turned into copper. It had gotten blonder as the days progressed but that auburn sheen hadn't disappeared. He was starting to think it never would.

 

“Do you like it?” Cecil inquired tentatively, fingers playing with a particularly long lock.

 

“Yes, I think it's fitting,” Carlos nodded, finally looking away from it, “Also...”

 

Cecil gave a little huff of surprise as the scientist unexpectedly drew him into a hug. Relief washed though them both for no reason they could explain or pin down. In this moment they were safe and they knew it. Carlos fingers pressed into him, moving as if looking for injuries he couldn't see. The host wasn't sure what was going on until he realized his friend must've been listening to the show. He could only imagine what it sounded like on the other end.

 

Cecil's hands were slow and unsure as they came up to lay along the other's soft t-shirt. He hugged him back, moving as if he were in a dream because he wasn't quite convinced that it was actually happening. Carlos was solid against him and had that lovely cyanide smell clinging to his hair and neck, like almonds laying in the sun. The scientist sniffed and made a breathy sound, the sudden salt in the air telling him that the other was trying not to cry.

 

“What did they do to you?” Carlos pulled back but not far, standing toe-to-toe with the other.

 

“Nothing, nothing,” Cecil assured him, palms still lying flat along the man's shoulders, “They wouldn't really hurt me. I-I was just playing it up.”

 

“You can't fool me, I know you're lying,” the scientist wrinkled his nose up, “You sounded like you were an inch from death. You had me so scared I couldn't stay at home.”

 

There was a twinkle in those bright eyes, “Darling Carlos, were you worried?”

 

Carlos could've been blushing but he couldn't tell, his skin too luxuriously dark to let the color through.

 

“You were,” Cecil confirmed, smiling.

 

“Just at the end,” he defended himself, “I thought you were... _dead_. Or worse, as you'd say.”

 

The host felt his heart flutter behind his ribs, “And that upset you so much you stopped working?”

 

Carlos rolled his eyes at the pleased tone, “More than you know.”

 

A look of hurt struck the taller man's handsome face. He stepped back to put some distance between them, the fuzzy feelings that had been invoked slipping away. The words weren't much but it they were enough to strike a cord in his low self-esteem. Carlos realized what he'd done before the other could get too far away. He reached out and grabbed the burnt blonde by his elbow, dragging him back.

 

“Of course it did. I'd like to think us...” Carlos rolled a few words along on his tongue, “ _Amigos cada vez más estrechas. Compañeros_.”

 

Goosebumps broke out across Cecil's arms the moment he heard that delectably smooth accent, “I didn't know you spoke Spanish.”

 

“Only on my mother's side,” Carlos replied dumbly, trying to joke and failing horribly, “Do you know the language?”

 

Cecil frowned. He'd grown up in the desert, of course he knew Spanish. He'd be insulted if it wasn't for the fact that three or four shifts ago he'd lost all knowledge of it. That and the ability to skip rope. He'd managed to unearth a few phrases and general meanings but besides that the space where Spanish used to be was vacant. A dark void he often reached to on instinct only to find an infinite nothing.

 

Fitting into his true form had consequences that even _he_ couldn't foresee.

 

“Not anymore,” he admitted honestly, “What did you say?”

 

Carlos let go of his elbow, fingers trailing reluctantly, “That I'd call us friends.”

 

“We are?” Cecil gasped, eyes rounding out before the biggest smile came over his face, “We are! Oh yes, Carlos, we _are_!”

 

“You look like some sort of predator with all those teeth,” Carlos commented, barely getting the words out before he was swooped up into a tight hug. He laughed breathlessly as the man's enthusiasm, returning the embrace once he wiggled his arms out of the man's grip.

 

“I'm glad you're okay,” he admitted to the host's shoulder.

 

“Now you know how I feel,” Cecil countered, getting another chuckle out of both of them. He happened to look across the street to see a pair of binoculars disappear back into a bush. Someone was watching. Someone was probably filming the entire moment.

 

Damn it.

* * *

**I think I might write a snippet about Cecil seeing Carlos's short hair, maybe. Probably when I'm bored I'll crank it out. Hope you guys are still enjoying it, though my Cecil-interpretation is changing.**  

 

 


End file.
